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HP Shows Off PA-8800 SMP-On-A-Chip CPU Plans
Eric^2 writes: "At last week's MicroProcessor Forum, HP's David J. C. Johnson unveiled the details of HP's latest RISC processor destined to redefine performance in Server-Class processors. Following a relatively simple strategy, the PA-8800 processor combines two PA-8700 cores on a single chip to enable symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) on a single processor. Aside from bumping the core speed up to an initial 1 GHz, enhancements include the addition of combined 35 MB L1+L2 cache. The article contains the full text. AMD, please steal an idea..."
These companies tend to patent anything that will give them a competitive edge in the marketplace. "Stealing an idea" would probably get them into some legal hot water, just like stealing a TV, or your car.
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Do you work for apple? Are you 13? And if yes to the second question, are you female and nubile?
PA-8800 lets you create two opposite predicates in one instruction, for example the predicate a=b.
// pLT & pNLT are 2 complementary preds
;; // add to b [then] // or sub from b [else]
;; // uses of b
;;
// speculatively sub from b (into temp) // and add to b
;; // uses of b [then] // uses of b (temp) [else] // move bTmp to b [else]
;;
This seems to indicate that there are no separate "do this if predicate is true" and "do this if predicate is false" instructions, so for opposite predication you would have to specify two different predicates.
The processor cannot know that these two predicates are related, so this would give you quite a problem.
As has been publicly disclosed, in general in PA-8800, an instruction reading any resource (such as a predicate) must be in a later instruction group (cycle) than the instruction writing that resource. As a special case, branches are allowed to use a predicate written by another instruction in the same instruction group (as shown in the IDF slides).
So, the straightforward (but slow) PA-8800 schedule for the earlier example:
if (a < 0)
b += a;
else
b -= a;
c += b;
d += b;
would be:
cmp.lt pLT, pNLT = a, 0
(pLT) add b = b, a
(pNLT) sub b = b, a
add c = c, b
add d = d, b
which takes 5 instructions in 3 cycles. (Note: In PA-8800 assembly, ";;" indicates the end of an instruction group, "=" separates the target operand(s) from the source(s), "//" begins a comment, and (pred) specifies the controlling predicate.)
An alternate (faster) schedule in PA-8800 is as follows:
sub bTmp = b, a
add b = b, a
cmp.lt pLT, pNLT = a, 0
(pLT) add c = c, b
(pLT) add d = d, b
(pNLT) add c = c, bTmp
(pNLT) add d = d, bTmp
(pNLT) mov b = bTmp
This takes 8 instructions in 2 cycles and one extra register. The final move of bTmp to b can be eliminated if b isn't live out at that point.
He's not even smart enough to be a truly funny troll, do the people who vote for this have so little sophistication that they consider this well disguised sarcasm?
Benevolent_spork is an asshole
from The Daily Telegraph
You have to go the site and search on "Gore":
Did Al Gore win after all? US newspapers
would rather not say
By Charles Laurence in New York
(Filed: 21/10/2001)
Did Al Gore win after all? US newspapers
would rather not say
By Charles Laurence in New York
(Filed: 21/10/2001)
THE most detailed analysis yet of the contested Florida
votes from last year's presidential election - with the
potential to question President Bush's legitimacy - is being
withheld by the news organisations that commissioned it.
Results of the inspection of more than 170,000 votes
rejected as unreadable in the "hanging chad" chaos of last
November's vote count were ready at the end of August.
The study was commissioned early this year by a
consortium including the Wall Street Journal, the
Washington Post and the New York Times, the nation's
most powerful newspapers, and the broadcaster CNN.
It was regarded as a means of supplying final answers to
the nagging questions over President Bush's razor-thin
victory margin. The cost was more than ú700,000.
Now, however, spokesmen for the consortium say that
they decided to "postpone" the story of the analysis by
the National Opinion Research Centre (NORC) at the
University of Chicago for lack of resources and lack of
interest in the face of the enormous story of the
September 11 attacks and the subsequent "war on
terrorism".
Newspapers were saying last week that the final phase of
the analysis, the actual counting of the 170,000 votes,
had been "postponed" but would become known at an
appropriate time.
America's liberal newspaper establishment originally set
up the commission in the belief that it would discover that
Al Gore was the winner of the Florida count.
Their hope for a Gore victory appears to have been
sacrificed on the altar of patriotism and a perception that
America needs to be led into war by a strong president.
"Our belief is that the priorities of the country have
changed, and our priorities have changed," said Steven
Goldstein, the vice-president of corporate communications
at Dow Jones and Co, the owners of the Wall Street
Journal.
Catherine Mathis, a spokesman for the New York Times,
said: "The consortium agreed that because of the war,
because of our lack of resources, we were postponing the
vote-count investigation. But this is not final. The intention
is to go forward."
However David Podvin, an investigative journalist who
runs an independent web page, Make Them Accountable,
said he had been tipped off that the consortium was
covering up the results.
He refused to disclose his source other than to describe
him as a former media executive whom he knew "as an
accurate conduit of information" and who claimed that the
consortium "is deliberately hiding the results of its recount
because Gore was the indisputable winner".
He also claims that a New York Times journalist who was
involved in the recount project had told "a former
companion" that the Gore victory margin was big enough
to create "major trouble for the Bush presidency if this
ever gets out".
Yes, that's right. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld helped me out by licking some of those pesky Anthrax spores out of my rectum so I didn't get any cutaneous hemhorroids.
Then afterwords we sat around and watched TV, he was really pissed off that someone leaked to the press about the ground invasion over the weekend. Then he licked my asshole again just to make sure.
AC RULEZ!!!!!